A Simple Habit to Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness is quite the trend nowadays. Celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Richard Branson are touting it. And a bunch of apps are coming out to help with mindfulness meditation. One of these apps that looks simply fascinating is Simple Habit.

Yunha Kim is a former investment banker who left Wall Street to found her first startup. She raised over $3M from prominent investors including Tyra Banks, Turner Broadcasting, and Great Oaks VC. The result was selected by Google as one of the best apps of 2014.

Like many of us Yunha found herself super stressed. For relaxation she turned to mediation. Since then, she’s been meditating for just a few minutes a day, and it has improved her life dramatically. That prompted her to build Simple Habit to help busy people experience mindfulness.

Designed by a team of a Harvard psychologists and meditation experts, Simple Habit meditations take just 5 minutes and are personalized for all kinds of life situations. From before going to work in the morning or preparing a difficult conversation, to dealing with PMS, Simple Habit can help you get through the day.

How Can Mindfulness Meditation Help Me?

Mindfulness meditation has been found to help us in many ways. It can increase our subjective well-being, alleviate psychological symptoms like depression and anxiety, and improve our ability to regulate our behaviors.

Too Busy? Don’t Worry

The Simple Habit App. Credit: Simple Habit.

Just one week of brief daily mindfulness meditation practice has been found to produce significant improvements in attention, energy, and stress (depression, anxiety, anger) compared with simple relaxation. These benefits were more than just subjective: participants experienced decreases in stress, controlled cortisol, and improvement in their immune system. They also displayed improved visuospatial processing, working memory, and executive functioning – important sets of mental skills that help you get things done faster. Importantly, the longer you stick with practicing mindfulness meditation the better. Long-term practitioners of meditation actually have more grey matter density in the brain stem regions associated with cardiorespiratory control.

Strengthen Your Relationships

Learning to be more mindful doesn’t have a positive impact only on you – it can have a positive impact on your relationships too. Increased mindfulness led to significant improvements in marital quality, identification, communication, and expression of emotions. Practicing mindfulness has also been associated with greater satisfaction in relationships, as well as better communication with your significant other during potentially stressful discussions about the relationship. And you don’t have to practice mindfulness alone. Couples who meditated displayed more empathy and non – judgmental acceptance toward each other. They were also more likely to act with awareness and report greater body satisfaction and less social anxiety. Indeed, the more mindful couples were on a specific day, the more relationship happiness they experienced. Even three months later, couples continued to report improved relationship satisfaction and quality.

Russell Suereth is the creator, publisher, and host of the Spiritual Fizz Podcast and the Spiritual Fizz News Magazine. The episodes and articles in these publications focus on connecting the spiritual and physical worlds for listeners and readers across the globe.

He is also an award-winning artist who creates spiritual New Age music that elevates the sense of spirituality in his listeners.

You can reach Russell through Facebook or Twitter, or via email at russell@spiritualfizz.com.